Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

THE INDIAN TOMB
an active syncretism of Sufi fraternities, as they gave priority to the
political unity of the state over religious ‘purity’.
It is obvious that in the peculiar conditions of the empires, sultanates
and principalities of medieval India, where Muslim minority ruled
over a many times numerically greater non-Muslim majority, any
other, more rigorous religious policy would have been simply
impossible. Therefore, syncretism in religious and cultural spheres
objectively promoted religious peace and socio-political stability. In
the present century Indian historians not infrequently see in religious
and cultural syncretism the result of conscious inter-confessional
collaboration, which is correct only to a certain extent. In the
majority of cases this syncretism was a by-product of superficial
Islamization, the illegitimate offspring of popular Islam, unconsciously
retaining in it a conglomerate of pre-Islamic religious beliefs.
Only in rare instances did syncretism become the policy of the upper
social strata and intellectual elite, and it is precisely this syncretism that
evokes particularly tender emotion on the part of modern historians.
Therefore, the names of such well-known supporters of syncretism
as Ibrahim Sharqi, the Sultan of Jaunpur, and Sultan Zainul‘abidin of
Kashmir, Ibrahim II ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur and Muhammad Quli Qutb
Shah of Golkonda, Mahmud Begra, the ruler of Gujarat, and the
Mughal emperor Akbar started being shown to the best advantage
in contrast to the names of those who adhered to a rigid conservative
policy in the interests of purity of faith. To the latter – Sultan of Delhi
Mubarak Shah Khalji, Ghiyathuddin Tughluq, Muhammad Tughluq
and Firoz Shah Tughluq, Sikandar Lodi and the Great Mughal
Aurangzeb – fell the thankless roles of fanatic and obscurant.
However, if for the time being we leave aside what historical science
today considers to be beneficial and progressive for the Indian society
of that distant age and turn to the problem of syncretism, insulated
from its socio-political context, as to a purely religious problem,
then from this point of view entirely different fragments of the Indian
cultural landscape come to light.
Irrespective of what the spiritual content of certain forms of piety
was in medieval Indian Islam, much is found therein which could be
considered ‘wild growth’, an uncontrolled but redundant and at times
deforming outgrowth of religious life. It applies mainly to the cult of
saints, which having crossed over to Indian soil, flourished to full and
indeed uncontrolled bloom. It was in the sphere of the veneration of
the numerous Sufi shaikhs, sayyids and pīrs that religious syncretism,
by its chaotic diversity, posed the greatest threat to pietism and the
stringent fulfilment of the injunctions of Islam.
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